Pretty cool stuff, though, to know that a more user friendly installation process can be written for YaBB.

I think those developing YaBB are already thinking of an easier way to install its software.

Interestingly, as I've read elsewhere, the possibility that one or more people were at the point of forking YaBB to a new and better software is at least partly responsible for YaBB's current push to move forward.

This may have been, and could have been the result of just one person. This is one of the cool things about open source software, and as it should be for the masses.

The timing of one or more people possibly moving forward with YaBB also appeared to have been the catalyst to moving this forum to a fast and reliable host when it had previously been languishing with a host that continued to have unresolved issues.

I guess the behind-the-scenes details don't matter as much as the apparent fact that YaBB is indeed moving forward with its next generation of forum software.

This is great news.

I should add, in my humble opinion, that moving forward with YaBB's next generation of forum software doesn't have to be done quickly. In fact, I think it should be done more purposely, i.e., more slowly so that bugs can be worked out, and a substantial YaBB core can be a reliable foundation for all newer versions of YaBB.

But then, what do I know? I'm just a simple user with dreams of grandeur for YaBB.

Keeping us updated with a bit of news about YaBB's progress from time to time would be cool, but more importantly, it's probably best to have people stick to the more reliable 2.4 version of YaBB and use it for the great forum software that it is.

So maybe this forum can be put back on 2.4 with the installation of at least one anti-spam mod, at which point support for this reliable and stable version of YaBB can be given in confidence until the next generation is ready for the masses.

Edited:

Edited to correct a typo.

« Last Edit: Jun 16th, 2012 at 9:04pm by Bill Myers »

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Re: Upgraded from 2.4 to 2.5 and now brokenReply #76 - Jun 16th, 2012 at 9:54pm

The thing with forgotten.passes (and most other data files as well) is if it doesn't exist and it needs to exist, YaBB is supposed to create it. But what was happening (apparently) with that file is it DID exist but had bad data.

For the vast majority of people on Linux/Apache, the hardest part of installing a fresh version of YaBB is remembering to set the permissions on the files that need to be 755. (And NOT using which ever version your host has for download since it's invariably an old version.)

Also, as we now well know, IIS has a profoundly different way of doing permissions than Apache/Linux, which can mess things up.

The other place where things seem to get bollixed up is moving from any older version of YaBB to 2.5. For some reason, even with a virgin install of 2.5 and moving the member and message files over and running the proper utilities, sometimes there are some files that just don't translate properly or disappear.

These are things that need to be looked at for the next version of YaBB.

If you only have one solution to a problem you're not trying hard enough!

For the vast majority of people on Linux/Apache, the hardest part of installing a fresh version of YaBB is remembering to set the permissions on the files that need to be 755. (And NOT using which ever version your host has for download since it's invariably an old version.)

All of Danello's points are of course excellent, but the one point I quoted her above particularly stands out for me. I can confirm that what she points out is exactly what happened to me.

For whatever reason our server evidently automatically assigns permissions of 644 to those folders and files that should be set to 755. This shouldn't be a big deal to anyone who is paying attention to it, because permissions can obviously be changed, but that kind of thing can happen.

I am quite certain that the 500 error I got when I last attempted a fresh install of YaBB 2.5 was because permissions were incorrectly set, i.e., ultimately my mistake.

I'll try a fresh install of 2.5 again at some point just for the practice of it, and I'll be sure to pay extra special attention to the assignment of permissions.

When I needed to move my company's sites off of a server in Los Angeles to a new server in Dallas (versus a physical move that would have included too many hours of downtime) I was anxious about the YaBB 2.4 forum I operated for one of our sites.

Thankfully, I addressed this with one of the techs who made sure that everything on the server we were moving from would be copied EXACTLY as it was over to the new server, and I do mean EXACTLY.

Gratefully, there were hardly any glitches at all, and there were no apparent glitches with our YaBB forum. After the transfer, everything seemed to work well.

I had been so worried about this that I kept both servers operating before approving the propagation over to the new server.

But this topic is about a Windows server; not UNIX, and it's about Ian's installation problems, which pretty much now seem to be behind him. What a relief!

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Re: Upgraded from 2.4 to 2.5 and now brokenReply #79 - Jun 18th, 2012 at 10:44pm

Guys, I will try and document what I did over time, but to reduce all of the above to something simple:

NTFS RIGHTS: If they are wrong they will break everything.REFERRER SECURITY: If this applies to ANY page that an end user has to interract with (whlst not logged in), then that page will not work for them.

Pretty much all I have done to fix everything is give max NTFS rights to any script, and turn off Referrer Security on ANY page that a user who is NOT logged in might need to interract with.

I have been teachning myself PHP for a while, which isn't so different to Perl, so I'm going to try and write a .pl script to test and report on file / dir permissions which may or may not be useful to other people. I could be totally wrong here, but the weakness of Yabb seems to be the error trapping ... instead of saying "I tried to write to the <whatever> file, but this was not writable", it simply tries without error trapping, and then drops to an untrapped error, resulting in a fail with no reason.

Now, why simply expanding the 2.5 uprade over the top of the working dirs containing a perfectly working 2.4 system then caused all of the carnage I saw , is a question for another day

« Last Edit: Jun 18th, 2012 at 11:09pm by sausagenet »

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Re: Upgraded from 2.4 to 2.5 and now brokenReply #80 - Jun 30th, 2012 at 6:38pm

I have been teachning myself PHP for a while, which isn't so different to Perl, so I'm going to try and write a .pl script to test and report on file / dir permissions which may or may not be useful to other people. I could be totally wrong here, but the weakness of Yabb seems to be the error trapping ... instead of saying "I tried to write to the <whatever> file, but this was not writable", it simply tries without error trapping, and then drops to an untrapped error, resulting in a fail with no reason.

Now, why simply expanding the 2.5 uprade over the top of the working dirs containing a perfectly working 2.4 system then caused all of the carnage I saw , is a question for another day

the first part of this is already done if you installed Perl on your system. There should be a test file in your cgi-bin file called 'printenv.pl'. Sending 'printenv.pl' through a web browser will print out everything there is to know about Perl on that system. If there isn't, you can find the file online, and change the shebang line to meet your system.

The second part I have to say. PHP came from Perl. It was created as a modular system and not a language to create web objects like chat rooms and forums using Perl Modules. It was rather easy, but the users of PHP wanted more and did not want Perl on their system. Thus the language evolved onto its own construct. This is why there is a similarity between the two even though PHP Secular Purists will always deny that PHP is its own language and not a off-shoot of Perl. As a Perl Programmer myself, I can easily go to PHP because of the similarities is has with Perl.

I dont know enough to say about your problem other than check your file permissions. This has always been a problem with installing generic web software for a webserver because it is not able to do these checks for you. Now, if YaBB was a Microsoft Product, it would do the permissions checking and changing as needed to install itself. But since YaBB can go onto many systems, and not just Microsoft's, it needs a little more work than just slapping into place and see if it runs on the very first try.

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Re: Upgraded from 2.4 to 2.5 and now brokenReply #81 - Jun 30th, 2012 at 7:58pm

HiThanks for replying - and particularly to all the guys previously who helped me resolve everything.

95% of my problems were just down to NFTS permissions. Most of the error messages and strange behavior went away just by correcting the NTFS permissions - nothing else. This was my fault not triple-checking in the first place. BUT The problem was, that I was trying to respond to spurious error messages, which in no way helped with the troubleshooting, when a simple "tried to read/write to this file but failed" would have resolved instantly.

Quote:

the first part of this is already done if you installed Perl on your system. There should be a test file in your cgi-bin file called 'printenv.pl'. Sending 'printenv.pl' through a web browser will print out everything there is to know about Perl on that system.

No - not at all - that is a check for Perl being installed correctly, which was nothing to do with my problem, since my Perl Env was woking just fine and had been for years. What I was suggesting was the equivilent of this but specifically for Yabb permissions/environment.

Quote:

But since YaBB can go onto many systems, and not just Microsoft's, it needs a little more work than just slapping into place and see if it runs on the very first try.

No-one is denying that. All I suggested was a very simple way of making troubleshooting much easier to give Yabb a chance of being installed by a larger set of people who might not understand PERL, IIS, NTFS permissions, etc, or many days devoted to learning it! Anyway, in this particlar instance:

-I have ran *every* version of Yabb for the last 10 years so would like to think I have a weenie bit of experience with it (along with over 20 years experience of installing global IT systems). Yet I struggled???-This "upgrade over the top" broke a system that had ran ncely for all these years. I wasn't trying to "slap something in" and the 6 pages of Q&A above show many many more attempts to resolve after "the first try"

Sorry for the long post, but I am very grateful to Yabb Team for both the free software I have been given, and the support I have been given every time, so I don't want this thread to tail off with a "here's why it can't be any easier post, when...

1) It can be. Easily. A little file to check perms just for MS is not beyond the wit of the incredibly clever people who produce Yabb.2) It HAS to be. Look around the forums and see the same questions over and over again. Imagine a simple script, incuded in the distro, called MScheck.pl that would all but resolve all the issues anyone on MS had?

Anyway - not here to argue - my forum works again - just like it did before I attempted the upgrade.

Cheers!--ian

PS. I never needed to upgrade. I upgraded because I though the new 2.5 *must* have better anti-spam systems than 2.4. But - it doesn't. The spam (literally 100s of bogus registrations every day that totally bypassed the Captcha) has been resolved - 100% - by the anti-spam mod mentioned somewhere above. I now get *no* bogus registrations. This is awesome.!

« Last Edit: Jun 30th, 2012 at 8:05pm by sausagenet »

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Bill Myers

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Re: Upgraded from 2.4 to 2.5 and now brokenReply #82 - Jul 1st, 2012 at 12:54am

Sorry, but the quote function seems to be down for me at this time, so ...

All I suggested was a very simple way of making troubleshooting much easier to give Yabb a chance of being installed by a larger set of people who might not understand PERL, IIS, NTFS permissions, etc, or many days devoted to learning it!

Agreed!

I've advocated for this all along; developing a user friendly installation package for YaBB.

Some people have stated that this can't be done, but of course it can be done because other forum software have already done it.

The developers whom I respect, and admire the most are those who work to figure out whatever it takes to get something done versus those who give us explanations as to why something can't be done.

So instead of saying "It's can't be done," the truly smart developers will say, "Let's see how it CAN be done!"

Bottom line: Time and time again I've seen relatively intelligent people having difficulty installing YaBB, or upgrading it. This shouldn't be happening.

Edited:

Oh, about stopping spam-bots cold in your forum, way to go!

Now if we can only get the powers that be to stop being so stubborn about it, they too will learn how easily it is to solve an otherwise very irritating problem.

We've taken the "horse" to water, but ...

« Last Edit: Jul 1st, 2012 at 12:58am by Bill Myers »

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Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.